—Blaine the Mono, to Roland and the Ka-Tet, at the end of The Waste Lands

Welcome to A Read of The Dark Tower series. Join me each week as I, Constant Reader, tackle the magnum opus of Stephen King’s career for the first time. If you want to discuss in general terms or talk about these first sections, join me by commenting here.

When we last left the story, Roland had seen inside the wizard’s glass and his priorities changed from Susan to Tower. Meanwhile, Sheemie and Olive Thorin are trying to rescue Susan from the clutches of the Reap Fever that’s overtaken the town.

Susan, Olive, and Sheemie ride north. When Susan questions their route, Olive explains her rationale—she’s given this some thought. She wants to go a way their pursuers won’t expect, and thinks they’ll spend the night in some of the sea-cliff caves, which she knows well from her childhood as a fisherman’s daughter.

Olive sends Sheemie back to Seafront so that he can steer riders in a different direction if necessary, then meet them at a particular signpost after dark. Sheemie says goodbye to Susan and, we’re told, “it was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Freed from her idiot of a husband, Olive’s come into her own: “She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew…or thought they knew.”

Another bit of wisdom from Sheemie. Susan kisses him before he leaves and thanks him for all his help. “’Twas only ka,” he says. “I know that…but I love you Susan-sai.”

I sure hope Sheemie survives all this. We’ve been told from back in the days of The Gunslinger that Susan won’t, and I wish I didn’t know that. The suspense would have been greater had I been wondering if she’d survive and not just a confirmation of how she’ll die, which we’ve also pretty much been told. Foreshadowing is not always a good thing.

Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encounter one of Latigo’s lookouts a mile from Hanging Rock, but it’s a young, confused boy who doesn’t question it when they greet him with the Good Man’s “sigul.”

As they ride on toward Hanging Rock, Roland gives them some last-minute instructions: “Remember that it’s hit-and-run. Slow down for nothing. What we don’t get must be left—there’ll be no second pass.”

And then “the gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Nice look at a skill of Cuthbert’s as he’s able to mimick the lookout’s deep In-World accent flawlessly and thus reduce any suspicion about them. He’s proven beautifully useful so far with his slingshot, too.

Susan and Olive ride around a bend and have the buzzard’s luck of running into Clay Reynolds and two other riders, one of whom Susan doesn’t know and the other of whom is Kimba Rimer’s brother Laso.

Susan tells Reynolds his friends are dead, but he doesn’t much care. He’s decided to ride on without them anyway. Olive tells them they should let Susan ride on, that she’s done nothing wrong. When Rimer says she helped Dearborn escape, the man who murdered Olive’s husband and his own brother, Olive stands up to him. Kimba Rimer had “looted” half the town’s treasury, she tells him, keeping a lot of it for himself. … and, besides that, Clay Reynolds was probably the one who killed Kimba Rimer.

When the men refuse to let the women pass, Olive pulls a “huge and ancient” pistol—the sight of which astounds the men, “Reynolds as much as the other two; he sat his horse with his jaw hanging slack. Jonas would have wept.”

Olive gets off a shot but the gun jams, and Reynolds kills her with a single shot. Only then does Rhea come forward in her evil little black cart. She admits that even though the boys have taken her glass ball, she saw much in it beforehand, including which way Olive and Susan would be trying to escape.

Rhea orders Reynolds to bind Susan’s hands and stand her in the back of the cart so they can parade her through town.

What Constant Reader Learns: Susan realizes Reynolds might claim to not need Jonas but “he’s less without Jonas. A lot less. He knows it, too.”

The image of Olive with the big gun is pretty hilarious. Well, until Reynolds kills her with a shot to the heart. I hate to see her die this way, but at least she died after regaining some of her dignity. And not because she’d reasoned wrong in how to help Susan escape. One can’t fight ka.

As the boys ride toward Hanging Rock, Alain keeps thinking they should have just gone around Latigo’s group since they have the glass. Except that “a hundred generations of gunslinger blood argued against it.” So Alain rides on, threatening to knock his horse’s brains out if it gets skittish when the shooting starts.

Roland shoots first, but then the riders put up a defensive line and everyone starts shooting. Alain’s got the machine gun that Fran Lengyll had been carrying, shooting for the oil tankers. Once the tankers start to blow, Alain adjusts his aim and begins shooting the fleeing men. When the machine gun falters, he throws it aside and pulls his revolver. Cuthbert’s using his slingshot to shoot firecrackers at the tankers Alain has perforated.

What Constant Reader Learns: Great description of the tankers blowing: “The sound it made was like no explosion Alain had ever heard: a guttural, muscular ripping sound accompanied by a brilliant flash of orange-red fire. The steel shell rose in two halves. One of these spun thirty yards through the air and landed on the desert floor in a furiously burning hulk; the other rose straight up into a column of greasy black smoke. A burning wooden wheel spun across the sky like a plate and came back down trailing sparks and burning splinters….Black smoke rose in the air like the fumes of a funeral pyre; it darkened the day and drew an oily veil across the sun.”

Roland recognizes George Latigo since all the gunslingers in training had learned who Farson’s chief lieutenants were.

There was an elaborate plan for Alain to perforate the tankers and then Bert to shoot the steady stream of fireworks to ignite the spilling oil, but once the fire starts, it spreads by itself. “The ease with which the gunslingers had gotten inside the enemy’s perimeter and the confusion which greeted their original charge could have been chalked up to inexperience and exhaustion, but the placing of the tankers had been Latigo’s mistake, and his alone.”

Their work at Hanging Rock done, the boys ride toward Eyebolt Canyon.

What Constant Reader Learns: This is the first time, mentioning Farson’s lieutenants as being figures the gunslingers learned about during their training, that it directly ties the baby gunslingers’ training to what’s going on in the bigger world. We knew the adult gunslingers were involved in the fighting but this is the first mention I can remember of anything beyond the business of gunslinger skills being taught to the boys.

Love this: “Even before Roland raised his left arm and circled it in the air, signaling for Alain and Cuthbert to break off, the work was done. Latigo’s encampment was an oily inferno, and John Farson’s plans for a motorized assault were so much black smoke being tattered apart by the fin de año wind.”

Latigo is not a happy camper. Actually, he’s in a “brain-bursting rage.” He has to order one of his men to shoot another just to get their attention as they stand watching the fire with “gaping mouths and stupid young sheep faces.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Latigo sees the boys heading for the box canyon and thinks he’s going to follow them and “turn it into a shooting gallery.” Um…I’m thinking that’s not going to work out so well for him.

Roland has planned this all perfectly, ka or not. Except for the little detail about the human sacrifice about to be made back in town.

At the entrance to the canyon, the boys dismount and Alain takes the wizard’s glass and they let the horses go. Cuthbert wants to light the fire under the brush blocking the canyon entrance, but Roland wants that job for himself.

Cuthbert and Alain head off to the chimney-cut in the canyon while Roland waits. When Latigo and his men are about three-hundred yards from the canyon’s mouth, he lights the powder the boys had spread beneath the branches earlier.

What Constant Reader Learns: It occurs to me that Roland’s taking a lot better care of Rusher than he did Susan, but maybe I’m being unfair. But it still occurs to me that Roland’s taking a lot better care of Rusher than he did Susan. He even thinks at one point he’s glad Sheemie will keep her safe.

As Roland runs toward Cuthbert and Alain, he has a vision/hallucination of being with his parents at Lake Saroni in the northern part of the barony. He was very young, on a beach, and he remembered looking up and seeing his parents with their arms around each others’ waists. “How his heart had filled with love for them! How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul.”

But what he’s really seeing is Bert and Alain, hand in hand, walking toward the edge of the thinny. Panicked, Roland fires into the air to get their attention, and shouts, “Gunslingers! To me!” After three shots, Alain finally turns toward Roland but Cuthbert continues toward the thinny until Alain jerks him back. When Cuthbert looks down, the toes of his boots, which had gone into the edge of the thinny, are clipped off.

There’s no time to talk about the thinny, however. It’s time to climb out of the canyon.

What Constant Reader Learns: If the thinny could eat away the end of Cuthbert’s shoes so that his toes are sticking out, why didn’t it hurt his toes? I mean it would have been inconvenient for climbing out of the canyon, but seems like he should have come away with at least a streak of white hair or something. (Yes, tongue firmly in cheek.)

Here come Latigo’s hapless men, riding into the canyon so intent on their targets that they don’t notice the line of burning brush they have to ride through. Latigo’s in a fever of his anticipated victory, although he gradually becomes aware of all the bones lying in the canyon, and the whine, “insectile and insistent,” of the thinny.

Latigo rounds the bend in the canyon and his horse screams and rears, then goes down. Latigo realizes the buzzing sound is much louder now. The horses pile in behind and around him while he tries to get to his feet, a horse’s hoof gashing the back of his neck. The horses ride in, then freak out, turn, and try to ride back out—running into the ones who’re still riding forward. It’s an equine traffic jam with the thinny reaching closer.

Only now, as he’s choking and trying to get the riders to turn back, does Latigo realize there is smoke pouring into the canyon from behind them. Latigo’s number-two guy, Hendricks, goes into the thinny: “It came alive, somehow, as he struck it; grew green hands and a green, shifty mouth; pawed his cheek and melted away the flesh, pawed his nose and tore it off, pawed at his eyes and stripped them from their sockets. It pulled Hendricks under, but before it did, Latigo saw his denuded jawbone, a bloody piston to drive his screaming teeth.”

Not surprisingly, the riders behind Hendricks are quite anxious to NOT follow him but they can’t stop.

Latigo jerks a rider from his horse and mounts the animal. But the mouth of the canyon is blocked by fire, and he’s thrown from the horse again. He raises his gun to shoot the thinny as it beckons him toward it, but in the end, he drops the gun and walks into the green.

What Constant Reader Learns: Latigo’s thinking a little about covering his assets. “He would have to face Walter when this was over, perhaps Farson himself, and he had no idea what his punishment would be for losing the tankers…but all that was for later.” Mostly he wants to get the boys. Methinks he will do neither.

The whole scene with Latigo and company riding into the canyon and the thinny is just awesomeness. The end of Jonas might have been a letdown, but this one wasn’t.

Roland and friends watch the chaos from the notch, seeing what the men on the ground can’t: “The thinny was growing, reaching out, crawling eagerly toward them like an incoming tide.” “We killed them,” he thinks. “No, not we. I. I killed them.”

From above him, Cuthbert calls for Roland to look at the moon, and he’s startled when he looks up to see it’s dark. “How can it be almost dark? he cried inside himself, but he knew…Time had slipped back together, that was all, like layers of ground embracing once more after the argument of an earthquake.” Terror strikes Roland as he wonders if the pink ball has lied to him about Susan being safe—or at least misdirected him. He remembers the farmer’s words: “Life for you and life for your crop,” but Roland realizes what he really said was, “Death for you, life for my crop, Charyou tree. Come, Reap.” In his head, he hears Rhea taunting him.

He screams for Cuthbert and Alain to climb faster, hoping there’s still time to save Susan but knowing, inside, that it’s too late.

What Constant Reader Learns: Well, okay. Roland was bamboozled by the wizard’s glass. I’ll cut him some slack about Susan and the horse thing.

Susan doesn’t realize what’s in store until she finally sees a man with long red hair and a straw hat holding cornshucks, standing at the crossroads into town. He throws the shucks into the cart as she passes, and says “Charyou tree.”

Finally she understands. “There would be no baby for her, no wedding for her in the fairy-distant land of Gilead, no hall in which she and Roland would be joined and then saluted beneath the electric lights, no husband, no more nights of sweet love; all that was over. The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Interesting. Another farmer with long red hair.

Well, isn’t Susan the stoic martyr. Sorry, but I’d be calling Roland and Aunt Crazypads and Rhea the Bruja some pretty nasty names. I would not go gently into that good fire. Instead, she prays for Roland’s safety while Rhea cackles, “the straggling remains of her broomstraw hair flying out orange in the light of the bloated moon.”

The horses are back, but Roland’s fixated on the ball. He demands it from Alain, who hands it over very reluctantly. When Roland pulls it from the bag, it’s glowing, “a pink Demon Moon instead of an orange one.”

In the glass he sees Susan standing the cart, being pelted with cornhusks, rotten tomatoes, potatoes and apples by the good people of Hambry. Roland sees people he’d met and mostly liked while he was in Mejis, chanting for her death.

Roland begins screaming as he sees Aunt Cord come forward with the paint. Cuthbert and Alain hit Roland, trying to get the glass away from him, but they can’t as it “flashed faster and faster, eating its way into him through the wound it had opened, sucking up his grief like blood.”

What Constant Reader Learns: I’m speechless. And horrified. I knew it was coming and I wasn’t a big Susan fan, but it’s still…awful.

Cordelia dances the crazy dance and screams after splashing Susan with paint. The crowd is in a frenzy, and they place Susan in the stacked wood and set it alight. She thinks of Roland, even as Rhea and Cordelia light the fire, and shouts, “Roland, I love thee.”

The crowd grows a little uneasy, as if something in their old nature peeks out and is horrified at what they’re doing, killing one of their own.

What Constant Reader Learns: I have really mixed feelings about this scene that we’ve been marching toward for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I appreciate the buildup to the mob craze, but feel strangely uninvested in Susan herself. I think I would have been more emotionally invested in it if I’d stayed with Roland, looking into the glass. As it was, it felt overly dramatic with the shouted declaration of love and longing over Roland, with a sentimentality that most romance novels wouldn’t even allow.

Roland watches, howling “like a gutted animal, his hands welded to the ball, which beat like a runaway heart.”

Desperate when he can’t rip the ball from Roland’s hands, Cuthbert pulls out his revolver and aims it at the glass. The ball immediately goes black, and Roland drops like a rock. The glass rolls to the ground unharmed.

Frightened and angry, Alain steps forward, meaning to crush it, but Cuthbert stops him. “Don’t you dare, after all the misery and death we’ve gone through to get it.” Bert tells Alain to put the glass back in the drawstring bag and then help him toss the unconscious Roland over the horse’s back. “And that was how they left Eyebolt Canyon, and the seacoast side of Mejis; riding west beneath the Demon Moon, with Roland laid across his saddle like a corpse.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Hm. Interesting. Alan “thought of ka and drew back [after not crushing the glass]. Later he would bitterly regret doing so.” Also interesting that Cuthbert is the one taking charge, telling Alain what to do, and getting them moving again.

Roland still hadn’t awakened by the next afternoon, so Alain tries to use the touch to bring him around. It doesn’t work, so they make a travois and travel another day. When they finally go to bed that night, they wake up and find Roland sitting up, holding the blackened glass and looking at it with dead eyes. Day after day they ride, and Roland will eat and drink but not talk. Alain tries to use the touch on him again, but “there was nothing to touch…The thing which rode west with them toward Gilead was not Roland, or even a ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the close of its cycle, Roland had gone.”

What Constant Reader Learns: Lovely ending to this long flashback section, with Roland’s stunned heartbreak much more effective than Susan’s dramatic declarations.

I’m strangely ambivalent about being jerked back to the “real” story. But that’s where we’re headed!

That’s it for this week! Next week—same time, same place—we’ll continue our read of Wizard and Glass, beginning Part Four: All God’s Chillun Got Shoes.”

Inspite of all the foreshadowing, Susan's demise really gutted me.....The monstrosity of the "good folks of Hambry", the hideousness of Auntie Cordelia and Rhea. I can't even imagine doing this to someone!

Call me a softie, but I did like Susan. I felt for her trapped life in that small town, with little choice about her own fate. I momentarily became hopeful for Rolands humanity when he was so freaked out. But of course, in the end, losing Susan probably annealed his soul, and completed his tranformation into being the cold gunslinger we know now.

I shared your ambivalence about going back to the "real" story the first time I read this, and even more so now. I know there are a lot of other readers who can't wait to finish the pause and get back to the action, but I liked Roland's first ka-tet far better than his second, and I'm sorry to see them go.

The death of Latigo's men in the thinny was horrifying, even more so for me than Susan's death. I still wonder whether even the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it stakes were enough to justify that.

There does definitely seem to be a pecking order among the boys: Roland on top, followed by Cuthbert, with Alain at the bottom. Whether this is the order it should be, I don't know. Especially in this circumstance. Just as in the previous part of the re-read, Alain seems to have a special insight into the glass, and it doesn't seem to have the same power over him that it does over others. I think he's the only one who sees it for what it really is.

Ah, I feel so cold-hearted. Susan's death was horrific, and I was appalled by the townspeople and especially by her aunt--I kept waiting for her to have a moment of clarity. I expected no better of Rhea. I think what zapped some of the emotion for me from Susan's final moments were the noble, sacrificial "I love thee Roland" screams. If she'd thought them instead of shouted them, it would have been more powerful for me. It felt too over-the-top cinema for my taste. (Yeah, okay, SK is not known for subtlety.)

And I've read for next week's post and have grown really annoyed, speaking of over-the-top. (Clicks heels together and grouses away.)

The ease at which those tankers blew up never seemed right to me. That was supposed to be raw, unrefined crude oil, right? Crude isn't really that flammable or volatile. It must have been really "light" crude, and the tankers must have only been partially filled, so there'd be room for fumes to build up.

On another note, I recently opened up the Dark Tower comic... okay graphic novel "The Long Road Home" - which tells the story of what happened next to Roland, Cuthbert, Alain... and Sheemie. I hadn't looked at the book since I went through it when it came out. I didn't like it much when it then, and I like it even less now. I don't really recommend it. Suzanne, if you're ever tempted, don't do it until after you've finished the series. A little bit because of spoilers, but mostly because it's just awkward and doesn't match what I imagined that stretch of the story that SK only lightly sketched out in W&G.

And so the flashback ends, with some bangs and some fire. Susan dies and heartbroken Roland eventually becoming obsessed with the Tower.

I am not 100% sure, but I think that the brown haired farmer from Mejis is the same from the beginning of The Gunslinger, even though the guy was described as young when he met with Ro and his mule/donkey. Brown is a mysterous character, after all :)

And speaking of SK movies, I really want to see this book (like all of them) in movies already, even though I am not sure if Ron Howard is the right man to bring us the epicness. The first four books are amazing and really helped me on my way of becoming a fiction writer myself.

I always read Susan's final screams as a way to express the pain she was feeling without screaming in agony, and as a final flip of the bird to the town that would have seen her forced into the Mayor's bed and burn her at the stake. It moved me in ways the rest of the book didn't.

The fact that it seemed to force the townspeople of Mejis into realizing what they were doing was just bonus.

I must say, I really enjoyed this story with Ro and his first ka-tet much more than I remembered, despite it being really slow at times. The lovey dovey stuff between Ro and Susan wasn't all that bad and the sex stuff was not described in detail, accompanied by such painful lines like "It's like riding a bicycle" a la Under the Dome. Ugh.

It think it will take a while to get used to the present, but I am eagier to get to the finish of book four, as I don't remember that much about it. Unfortunately, the ending of book four means the beginning of Wolves of the Calla, which I consider overly long and quite boring. Impossible to read more than two times, at least for me. :(

The mist in "The Mist" was retconned as a thinny by the comics. It's plausible, I guess. The problem is that thinnies behave differently every time they are mentioned. (The ka-tet passed through one unharmed while riding Blaine, yet the Mejis thinny eats Latigo's men as if it is a living thing. The monsters in "The Mist" are similar to the todash monsters which live in the nowhere space between worlds in books 5 and 7, yet such monsters never come out of thinnies.)

Anyway, I've skimmed some of the comics in bookstores and am not terribly impressed. My impression is that the comics were plotted by King's assistant Robin Furth and he just cashed the checks.

Yeah, the DT fan base is kinda split on liking 1-4 the best, or liking 5-7 the best, kinda like the Buffy fandom. Unlike the Buffy fandom*, I really haven't found what the difference is between people who like one more than the other.

Like my Buffy, I like the later books better, especially with how intricate the story becomes.

*With Buffy fandom, I see mostly that it tends toward age, younger people who were introduced in high school like the high school years, older people who were outta high school, like the post high school years, IMO, YMMV.

Great readings! I only discovered these like five-six days ago and hurried to catch up with the story. The DT series one has been one of my favorites since the late 90's :)

Anyways, I was wondering if you are going to do a this kind of reading for the newest Tower book, The Wind Through The Keyhole, the short story shortly before the Gunslinger named Little Sisters of Eluria, and the original version of the Gunslinger book? Sorry if these has been answered already.

@19,
Song of Susannah is mostly about moving the chess pieces into the right places for book 7. You can summarize the key events in about 3 sentences.

I think at some point during the long interlibrum, King decided he wanted to write a gunslinger version of a John Sturges western, and he wanted to write a magnum opus that tied all of his fiction together in one meta-narrative, and then he realized that he needed a transition from one to the other.

@Did-a-Chick (love your name!)...We decided, in order to avoid spoilers, to wait and read Wind Through the Keyhole last. We hadn't really talked about extending the read to other Stephen King stuff, which might be fun. That will be up to the Tor Gods :-)

@StrongDreams and @DingDong...No, now that you mention it, there have been no endorsements of Song of Susannah...mayhap we shall fly through that one :-)

StrongDreams - I picked up the comics when they first came out and sorta just let it fall by the way, I really dug the artwork but I think the stories are a little meh, just didn't pull me in, and some of the art seemed better suited to non-verbal stuff, like it should be hanging in my game room as an homage to the original series rather than tied to a specific storyline (but that's just my two coppers).

Speaking of "fall by the way" - I was sooooo excited about the comic version of "The Stand" and was so underwhelmed (Suzanne, I know you mentioned not really being into graphic novels, but Ilike how they can give a really good visual that doesn't have the "budgetary concerns" that you get with a movie or a tv show and I HIGHLY recommend checking out Hack/Slash to any/everybody who enjoys horror, very well done & oodles better than the premise suggests).

Anywho, my biggest let-down with "The Stand" had nothing to do with the interpretation or the artwork. What I didnt like was that there are entire pages that have the artwork and the panels that you see in every comic book, but, instead of letting you absorb the artwork and extrapolate from it, there's text pretty much cut/pasted from the novel, dropped into sidebars or thought-bubbles, so it struck me as less a graphic novel than an illustrated, uber-abridged version of the original.

Hoo-boy, that ranted off into places I never expected, didn't it? *blushes*